When top advertisers look to crack the Chinese smartphone market, they may turn to a startup that does something Facebook can't.

Jana doesn't have a social network or its own messenger app to promote. Instead, the startup offers a simple proposition: try out other companies' apps, get back data to use however you want.

Facebook faces the inherent conflict of interest of wanting users to spend their time within Facebook or its family of apps. Jana doesn't care what you do, provided you've checked out a customers such as Amazon, Flipkart, Twitter or WeChat.

That neutral approach has helped Jana's app that manages the exchange, mCent, explode in popularity since early 2014. More than 30 million people use the service today, receiving an average of 56 megabytes per month (about a quarter of their total use). Two-thirds of that business is in mCent's lead market, India, where Facebook's Free Basics service has, Jana claims, half the reach and a lot more problems.

"We have a huge head start," says Jana CEO Nathan Eagle, who founded the company in the Boston area in 2009 after running a shoestring version in Kenya while a Fulbright professor in the country (read more on Jana's history in FORBES' July 2015 profile). Eagle has supported Facebook's efforts, he says. When people want a lightweight version of Facebook that won't drain their data, they can use Free Basics. "When they want Google search or the full web, they'll engage with mCent first."

mCent claims to be the second largest mobile ad platform in India today, behind only Google. And Jana's 311 carrier partnerships allow it to work with more than 3,000 brands in that country and others like Brazil and Indonesia. But one place Jana's never gone is China, the biggest opportunity of them all. To win in mobile in China, Eagle says, companies have to put staff on the ground. "You have to embrace everything about the country, to the point of rebranding the app or company name even, to something China-specific."

Armstrong and Levy's presence in Jana's inner circle points to the interest the company's gotten from more traditional advertisers. The company promises a host of anonymized information on its users that advertisers thirst for, from the amount of time spent into an app to the number of a user's friends that also sign up. Verizon, meanwhile, has obvious strategic possibilities with Jana's ability to get more people used to using mobile phones as a bigger part of their routine.

Most of Jana's 85 employees are developers and data scientists, says Eagle. That's about to change, too. "We will never run out of people to provide free Internet access to, but we need more brands," he says. As the startup looks to new markets, it'll also be working on new ways to monetize mCent. One area that remains unsolved: brand advertising. Eagle envisions something like a video ad similar to what you see before a YouTube video. "For some of these people, watching a video on their phone is still a pretty novel thing."

Eagle's comparisons are to companies much larger, and much higher valued, than Jana. "We're pacing on par with Snapchat over our first year," he says. With the help of Verizon and AOL, Jana's founder believes he's got a shot to join those ranks.

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